the Midas touch

King Midas was a wealthy man who wanted, above all things, to be wealthier still. One day he did a kindness to a companion of the god Dionysus, and the delighted god offered to grant him any wish he liked. Midas did not have to think. Let everything I touch, he said, turn to gold.

The god warned him, but Midas insisted, and the wish was granted. At first it was pure joy. He touched an oak twig and it stiffened into gold; he touched a stone and it gleamed; he ran through his halls laying his hands on pillars and doorframes and roses, and everywhere he passed the world turned bright and precious behind him.

Then he sat down to eat, and the joy curdled. The bread turned to metal on his tongue. The wine hardened to gold in his mouth. He could not eat, he could not drink — and when his own daughter ran to embrace him, she froze at his touch into a cold golden statue in his arms.

Starving, grieving, surrounded by more riches than any king had ever owned, Midas understood at last what he had done, and he begged the god to take the terrible gift away. He was told to wash in a certain river, and the power flowed out of him into the water, and the world grew ordinary and living again.

We keep the bright half of the tale when we speak of the Midas touch — the gift of turning whatever you handle into gold, of succeeding and profiting at nearly everything you try — though the old story never quite lets us forget the price hidden inside it.